At my Pure Fitness gym there’s a whole floor dedicated to what’s called “strongman” training. Forget the fancy machines with their pulleys and cables: Here you pick up heavy stuff and move it around. Simple, if not always elegant. But man, is it addictive.

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Witness the deadlift: All you do is pick a barbell up from the floor. Your legs groan, your arms heave, and suddenly it snaps up to waist height.

Or the barbell squat: Stick the barbell on your back, squat down and up, and hope your quads don’t give out by rep number 10.

Or the sled push, where you load weights onto a metal platform and push it back and forth along a carpeted track. The carpet provides resistance, the weights make it harder—and you can’t do two lengths before your heart is hammering at your ribs looking for a way out.

It’s hard, yes. But there’s a genuine, visceral satisfaction to these kinds of exercises. A real sense of achievement. The knowledge that, using nothing but your body, you have hauled these objects off the ground, slammed this sled up and down the track. When I do it, I feel, ever so briefly, like I AM A MAN!

Of course, when I look around me I’m soon humbled. The room is full of people lifting twice, three times, four times what I weigh—men and women alike. But, I realize, they’re not judging. We all started from the same place. And they’re too busy to spend time laughing at my struggle.

"It’s hard, yes. But there’s a genuine, visceral satisfaction."

My PT, Felix, points out that these exercises go beyond just making you feel good. They’re also some of the best exercises I could be doing because they employ the whole body. I’m not just working on getting myself some sweet, sweet biceps—I’m forcing every muscle in my body to work for it.

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And as I pull my heaviest deadlift yet, the fire of achievement runs through my blood. Today, I think to myself, I AM A MAN!

Next to me, a woman a quarter my size with abs of what I assume are some kind of titanium alloy lifts twice what I just did. She doesn’t even break a sweat.